3. An Urbanism Made of Neighborhoods

A Crime Has Many Stories began with La Loca y el Relato del Crimen, a ‘70s piece of literature by Ricardo Piglia at MALBA, The Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, located at the center of this city’s cultural promenades and ended with a newly commissioned crime story by Washington Cucurto in the alternative space of Eloisa Cartonera, an artist collaborative, in the heart of the working class neighborhood of La Boca. It is true what has been said, I thought, as I reflected on the ambition of this metropolitan cross-section filled with in-between artistic acts: That a city should not be defined any longer as the jurisdictional area bounded by its administrative borders, but, in fact, by the intensity of its limitless urban atmosphere, where the distinction between center and periphery dissolves in the voices of its multiple characters.  Nor it can be encapsulated by the protagonism of its iconic monuments. Instead, it is the drama of its anti-monumental fringes what produces a more compelling idea of urbanization, made of unpredictable social spaces that emerge in the least expected places, where no symbolism is necessary, only available space. In fact, one of the most emblematic images that Borges catapulted as the privileged site for his early avant-garde literature was not the centrality of Buenos Aires as a city but its edges, where the city was no longer; the blur between the city and the Pampa. As such, I also found Buenos Aires resonating with The Naked City of Debord, as he fragmented the top-down totality of Paris into neighborhoods, conceived as units of ambience where the intensity of the urban would be found at unexpected thresholds, corners and vacant sites, and then amplified and translated, in turn, as every day artistic actions. Here, in the perennial Paris of Latin America this idea is even more tangible: The urbanism of neighborhoods in Buenos Aires usurps an otherwise homogeneous, at first glance, urban impression of this city as a continuous parkway flanked by an un-interrupted fabric of generic towers filled with endless balconies. It is in the interior of these urban crevices where A Crime Has Many Stories positioned itself, where fragments of literature, film and art are stuffed, mixed with the vestiges of political and social struggles and the subliminal feats of soccer players. It is the traffic and flow of these images that propelled the pages of Piglia’s Relato de un Crimen as the catalyst to invade the city.

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